Kiss those Math Headaches GOODBYE!

Archive for the ‘Math in General’ Category

So here’s the situation: you’re at the breakfast table, enjoying a bowl of steaming-hot steel-cut oats and maple syrup, and you just poured yourself a mug of black coffee. But then you realize you want to pour some milk in the coffee (sorry, purists). But the milk is in the frig, six feet away. So of course you walk to the frig, grab the milk, bring it to the table, pour some in your coffee, return the milk to the frig and sit back down. Question: could you have done this more efficiently?

Yes, of course. You could have brought your cup of coffee with you as you walked to the frig, poured the milk right there at the frig, returned the milk, and then walked back to the table.

“Morning Joe”

When I realized this this morning, I thought … hmmm. Had I used a bit of forethought, I would save myself an entire round trip from the table to the frig. And while I have no problem making that extra trip (hey, just burned 1.3 calories, right?), the experience made me wonder if anyone has ever developed a mathematics of efficiency for running errands.

I could imagine someone taking initial steps for this. One would create symbols for the various aspects of errands. There would be a general symbol for an errand, and there would be a special ways of denoting: 1) an errand station (like the frig), 2) an errand that requires transporting an item (like carrying the mug), 3) an errand that requires doing an activity (pouring milk) with two items (mug and milk) at an errand station, 4) an errand that involves picking something up (picking up the mug), and so on. Then one could schematize the process and use it to code various kinds of errands. Eventually, perhaps, one could use such a system to analyze the most efficient way to, say, carry out 15 errands of which 3 involve transporting items, 7 involve picking things up, and 5 involve doing tasks at errand stations. Don’t get me wrong! I have not even begun to try this, but I’ve studied enough math that I can imagine it being done, and that’s one thing I love about math; it allows us to create general systems for analyzing real-world situations and thereby to do those activities more intelligently.

Of course, one reason I’m bringing this up is to encourage people to think more deeply about things that occur in their everyday lives. Activities that appear mundane can become mathematically intriguing when investigated. A wonderful example is the famous problem of the “Bridges of Konigsberg,” explored by the prolific mathematician Leonhard Euler nearly 300 years ago.

Euler in 1736 was living in the town of Konigsberg, now part of Russia. The Pregel River, which flows through Konigsberg, weaves around two islands that are part of the town, and a set of seven lovely bridges connect the islands to each other and to the town’s two river banks. For centuries Konigsberg’s residents wondered if there was a way to take a walk, starting at Point A, crossing each bridge exactly once, and return to Point A. But no one had found a way to do this.

One of the famous Seven Bridges of Konigsberg

Enter Euler. The great mathematician sat down and simplified the problem, turning the bridges into abstract line segments and transforming the bridge entrance and exits into points. Eventually Euler rigorously proved that there is no way to take the walk that people had wondered about. This would be just an interesting little tale, but it has a remarkable offshoot. After Euler published his proof, mathematicians took his way of simplifying the situation and, by exploring it, developed two new branches of math: topology and graph theory. The graph theory ideas that Euler first explored when thinking about the seven bridges sparked a branch of math that’s used today to determine the most efficient ways of connecting servers that form the backbone of the internet!

Of course, there’s also the classic example of Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” and running through the streets naked after seeing water rise in his bathtub. In that moment, Archimedes, who had been trying to help his king figure out if the crown that was just made for him had been created with pure gold, or with an alloy, saw that the water displacement would help him solve the problem. In the end, Archimedes determined that the crown was not pure gold, and the king rewarded the great thinker for his efforts.

As I write this, I find myself wondering if any of you readers can think of other situations in which everyday life experiences led mathematicians or scientists to major discoveries. It would be enlightening to hear more of these stories.

Whenever I can find a memory trick that helps students get something straight, I use it. Students needs to remember so many things in algebra, so whatever help we can give them is well appreciated.

So recently I stumbled upon a memory trick that helps students tell which of two numbers is greater and which is less.

Let's Reduce Mistakes in Algebra!

You might be thinking: greater and less?! Why would any student have trouble with that? Well, before students hit negative numbers and absolute value, there is generally little trouble. The greater numbers are the larger numbers, the lesser numbers are the smaller numbers. And kids basically know what we mean by larger and smaller whole numbers, when they are dealing with positive numbers and zero.

It shows a wide range of movies that have math content as part of the story, and it directs you right to the scenes that have the math woven in (check out the Flash links). Check them out and see if you agree that math can be as entertaining as … as … showbiz!

When we left off, we were talking about the double-slash, a form of notation I’ve developed that helps students attain greater focus when simplifying algebraic expressions.

With greater focus, students make fewer mistakes. With the double-slash at their disposal, students avoid the mistake of combining terms that should not be combined. In the following example, students use the double-slash twice to simplify an algebraic expression:

+ 8 – 2(3x – 7)

= + 8 // – 2(3x – 7)

= + 8 // – 6x + 14

= – 6x // + 8 + 14

= – 6x + 22

Let's Reduce Mistakes in Algebra!

By cordoning off the section with the distributive property: – 2(3x – 7), the double-slash allows students to see it distraction-free. With this heightened level of focus, students are more likely to work out the distributive property correctly, then continue on, simplifying the whole expression with no mistakes.

Would you say that the square root of two is an important number in math? Hmmm … and would you agree that the square root of three, while perhaps not quite so important, is still a quantity whose value students should be able to estimate?

Why not, right? After all, these numbers play key roles in the 30-60-90 and 45-45-90 “special triangles.” And therefore they both appear a lot in geometry, and a great deal in trig. And on top of that, root two, widely believed to be the first irrational number discovered, shows up in a wide range of other math contexts as well.

Who would think that a mere fly could play a major role in the history of human thought?

But when it comes to the development of Algebra, that’s the story. I’ll explain how this works just a bit later in this blog. But it is all related to what is happening now in algebra classes all around the world.

For it’s spring, that time of year again when we get out the graph paper and the ruler. Kids are working on the Cartesian coordinate plane.

One about I like about the coordinate plane is that there’s an interesting story about how it was discovered, or should I say, invented. [Hard to know the right word for an intellectual Invention like the coordinate plane.](more…)

But when we teach math, we often expect something similar from students. We expect them to learn a complex, multi-step process in one lesson, in one hour. We expect them to go from no awareness of the process, to awareness to competence to mastery. And we don’t take account of the fact that many math process requires a long ladder of thought steps. In edu-jargon, this process of taking all of the little steps into account — and teaching each step individually — is called “scaffolding.”

Like climbing Everest, doing Math requires many STEPS

I have long found “scaffolding” important in working with students who struggle with math in general and algebra in particular. (more…)

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